Executives at Save the Children, one of Britain’s best-known charities, shared
bonuses worth more than £160,000 last year, The Telegraph can disclose.

Performance-related pay for executives at the charity rose by more than a third on the year before and will fuel concern about boardroom pay at the UK’s aid charities.

Details of the bonuses emerged after The Telegraph disclosed a significant rise in the number of top executives at aid charities who were paid more than £100,000 a year, despite a fall in donations and revenues in many cases.

The research prompted William Shawcross, the chairman of the Charity Commission, to accuse the charities of bringing “the wider charitable world into disrepute” by accepting large pay rises.

Charlie Elphicke MP, a member of the House of Commons public administration select committee which oversees the charity sector, said the bonuses were “inappropriate and objectionable”.

He said: “Out-of-control salaries for charities risk bringing the voluntary sector into disrepute. Volunteers who are paid nothing will rightly ask why charities are paying bonuses like they are some kind of bank or big multinational. It seems inappropriate and objectionable.”

Save the Children confirmed that 20 per cent of the pay of its nine top executives was linked to performance.

It said that in 2012 £162,000 was paid out, including £22,560 to the charity’s chief executive Justin Forsyth, a former adviser to both Tony Blair and Gordon Brown.

In the previous year the charity paid out £120,000 to its top management, when Mr Forsyth declined to accept a bonus. Save the Children said that this was because “he was relatively new as CEO”. In 2012 he was paid £163,000 as chief executive, including his bonus.

A spokesman for Save the Children said that performance-related pay helped the charity to get “the very best” from its staff and “ultimately to save the lives of more of the world’s poorest children”.

It said that executive pay was marked against 20 performance indicators, including specific targets for saving lives, and its performance and remuneration committee reviewed them twice a year.

A spokesman said that performance-related pay had risen because Mr Forsyth declined his bonus in 2011 and because the organisation hits many more of its targets.

He said: “In 2012 we achieved many of our organisational objectives – reaching more children than ever before, delivering life-saving aid to more than three million children in more than 50 emergencies, and beating our challenging fundraising targets by more than 10 million pounds. As a result, overall performance-related pay to executive directors increased.”